Women work in a paddy field in a village in Bihar. Telegraph picture

Tetri Devi isn’t aware of the irony swirling around her but then her time is better used putting a meal together than mulling the finer points of her circumstances.

She’s just finished a hard season harvesting and threshing the paddy crop on a sharecropper’s mean wage but every time she’s gone to the village public distribution system (PDS) outlet to fetch her share of rations, she’s been turned back empty handed.

There aren’t any stocks, or so the shopkeeper has been telling her. “Come next week, try your luck, supplies might come, who knows.”

Tetri, a resident of Sitamarhi in north Bihar, has hand-processed a good crop, helped stuff it into gunnybags and sent it to the mandis. But when it comes to her own quota of foodgrain, none’s been available.

“What are we to do, we buy off the market at high rates, but what are we to do, if the sarkari shop says there’s no grain, there’s no grain, how are we to know why?”

Chief minister Nitish Kumar has set himself a stiff task on food security, resolving to provide subsidised rations to more than double the number of people the Centre recognises as those below the poverty line (BPL) in Bihar — an estimated 1.4 crore of the population as opposed to the Planning Commission’s count of 65 lakh. But his ambition is running far ahead of both availability and apparatus. There isn’t enough to begin with and what there is must ride a ramshackle and leaky administrative network whose familiarity with delivery and accountability is only just beginning.

Tetri is awaiting delivery on promises made and can begin to sound disappointed on what she has seen so far of the Nitish government’s second term. She comes from quintessential Nitish constituency — an EBC who turned an outspoken JD(U) votary during Nitish’s first term in power. “We expect much from him,” she says, “but there is often a difference between what people say and do, kathni aur karni mein pharak hai.”

At the other end of the food chain, so to speak, anxieties cognisant of the emergent —and back-to-the-wall — task at hand are palpable. Five minutes spent in the high and hectic chambers of food and civil supplies secretary, Tripurari Sharan, will tell you how many-fanged the food-scarcity beast is and how many fronts need concurrent minding.

Criss-cross phonecalls from all manner of agencies starting from block development officers in villages to Rail Bhavan and Planning Commission mandarins in New Delhi. En route, there are finance and public works officials, PDS agents, godown managers, Food Corporation of India (FCI) babus, truck operators, mukhiyas and MLAs and, on a bad day, even an irate or demanding minister of government.

“This is the only department that touches the lives of every single person in the state because every single person must eat,” says Sharan between calls trilling away on his table and the arrival and departure of files, “And the fact is we are still standing against a wall of long-term mismanagement, everything from railway rake schedules to ensuring fair delivery has to be straightened. There was no system in place, and what existed was mostly rotten, the challenge is to transform all that in a short time, there is very little time.”

The government’s second term has only just begun, but the urgency of delivering on food aren’t lost on Sharan. “We are up against it, no doubt, but we are engaged, that is the difference.”

A bureaucrat of vast and varied experience — his previous stations include a stint as boss of the FTII in Pune where he birthed two feature films — Sharan appears energised rather than enervated by the formidable task at hand.

“For all the difficulties and obstacles, there is a sense that something can be done now, there’s a boss who demands and encourages work and there is an opportunity to achieve things that are progressive, even radical. Hum haalat ki soorat badal rahe hain (we are changing the very way things were).”

Procurement, for instance, is already in quantum upgradation: from an average of 40,000 tonnes of wheat a decade ago to 20 lakh tonnes in 2008-2009, from a few lakh tonnes of paddy before Nitish took over to 1.7 million tonnes last year. Demands on the FCI are going up. Last year they sent in 1.3 lakh tonnes of foodgrains, this year four lakh tonnes have been sought.

But procurement alone is never enough. Storage facilities, of the FCI and the State Food Corporation (SFC), are insufficient and poor. The railways are slow coached. Eighty rakes were expected this season, so far only 20 have arrived. But here again Sharan has been able to leverage the years he spent in the Rail bureaucracy to speed things up. “The pressure is on and we have to answer, the chief minister asks questions and he will not take excuses for an answer, sorry.”

Doubling the BPL estimates of the state from the Centre’s count was a political decision Nitish Kumar took as a dare in his first time.

Now, he and the machinery must prove they did not miscalculate. Tetri, among hundreds of thousands, is waiting.